Campus style reflects a balance between practicality and personal expression, and jewellery plays a subtle but important role in that equation. Today, women’s jewellery on campus tends to favour clean, understated designs that can move easily between different parts of the day. From lectures to social events, students increasingly choose pieces that are easy to wear, adaptable, and quietly expressive.

Brands such as Edblad have become increasingly relevant within this shift toward minimalist campus fashion. Students are drawn to jewellery that combines simplicity with durability, allowing pieces to work across busy schedules and changing social settings. Scandinavian-inspired designs, known for their clean lines and understated elegance, fit naturally into modern student wardrobes where versatility and long-term wear matter more than overly trend-driven accessories.

Why Small Details Matter

Minimalist jewellery works well in student environments because it supports rather than dominates an outfit. With busy schedules and varied activities, accessories need to be reliable and versatile. Pieces that are comfortable and durable quickly become everyday essentials.

Quiet Pieces Fit Real Schedules

Student life rarely allows time for constant outfit changes. Jewellery that can transition easily from day to evening becomes more valuable.

• Slim chains that layer or stand alone
• Small hoops or studs that suit multiple settings
• Simple rings that can be worn daily without discomfort
• Lightweight bracelets that do not interfere with movement

These pieces integrate easily into different styles, whether paired with casual clothing or more formal outfits. Many students are drawn to brands like Edblad, where Scandinavian design principles focus on simplicity and function. Edblad creates nickel-safe jewellery in stainless steel, combining durability with a refined aesthetic. This makes the pieces suitable for frequent wear while maintaining a sense of understated sophistication.

Repeat Wear Signals Confidence

Fashion trends on campus have shifted away from constant novelty. According to insights highlighted in the State of Fashion, repeating the same accessories is no longer seen as a limitation but as a sign of consistency and personal style.

This shift aligns with practical considerations. Students often prefer fewer, higher-quality pieces that can be worn repeatedly across different outfits. Jewellery that maintains its appearance over time becomes part of a recognisable personal identity, rather than a temporary trend.

Subtle Style Still Feels Personal

Minimalist jewellery does not remove individuality; it reframes it. Small variations in layering, metal choice, or proportion allow students to express their style without relying on bold statement pieces.

This approach is also influenced by social media, where styling often focuses on detail rather than excess. A simple necklace or a set of rings can carry meaning through repetition and context. Over time, these pieces become associated with the wearer, adding depth to an otherwise minimal look.

Why This Style Continues To Last

Minimalist jewellery remains popular because it fits the realities of student life. It is affordable, durable, and easy to incorporate into daily routines. More importantly, it aligns with a broader shift toward thoughtful consumption and long-term use.

While bold accessories still have their place, everyday campus style favours pieces that are practical and adaptable. Jewellery that can be worn often, across different situations, offers lasting value. This combination of function and quiet expression ensures that minimalist designs continue to resonate with students.

Anyone who has been to the cinema at all in the last couple of years will have found themselves asking the question: “Why does everything look like that?” This feeling is especially palpable when you’re watching the exact same scene from 20 years ago, desaturated. The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens with Andy (Anne Hathaway) brushing her teeth in the mirror, a perfectly unsubtle reflection of the first seconds of the original film. The only marked difference is the colour grading and the quiet hum of Andy’s electric toothbrush, signalling the decades that have passed, given that Hathaway’s poreless face certainly tries to deny it. 

The original Devil Wears Prada was a film that took a major Hollywood gamble. Being an adaptation of the roman à clef of the same name, the production team were backed into a corner in terms of how to finance and market the film, given the sharp and overt satire of the woman who owned the entire fashion industry. Anna Wintour was still, by and large, the most powerful person in fashion when director David Frankel was fighting to create an accurate representation of the fashion industry in his film. Patricia Field, the costume designer, sourced approximately $1 million worth of clothing on a $100,000 budget through her personal connections outside of the so-called ‘Wintour ecosystem’. Intuitive filming locations like the Met, MoMA, and Bryant Park all had board members associated with Wintour and thus could not be used as sets. The film implicitly argues that this is a story worth telling, even if the industry it claims to be intimate with is intent on boycotting it. For an almost tiringly self-aware sequel – yes, we know that a million girls would kill for this job, and an early scene warps the Meryl Streep cinematic universe by featuring an Instagram post that uses a screencap of Miranda from the original film – The Devil Wears Prada 2 doesn’t seem to recall the conditions of production in 2006 at all. 

From its earliest scenes through to the very end, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is functionally an unskippable ad. The sponsorships that the film took are displayed in a very obvious and sometimes tacky manner  – though I could see it coming from a million miles away, the shameless Starbucks promo made me wince and sink into my seat a little further. Whilst the coffee cups can be ignored to some degree, the brand partnerships are unfortunately also integral to the plot. 

We find out early on that Emily (Emily Blunt) now works in the advertising department of Dior. Andy, Miranda, and Nigel (Stanley Tucci) must appease her after it is revealed that a puff piece published by Runway praises a brand that uses sweatshop labour. Emily leverages this against the Runway executives in order to secure a five-page layout for the new Dior flagship, which Andy is assigned to write. In her interview with Andy, Emily speaks glowingly of how designer brands have essentially made themselves inaccessible for the average, middle-class consumer. According to Emily, the shoes you wear, the bag you carry, they speak to who you are and what you care about. Andy scoffs at this because she knows what the audience knows, too: your Dior purse only tells the world that you have too much money and not a clue what to do with it. The frustrating part is that she is functionally not at liberty to say anything else. The iron-clad partnership with Dior means that Andy, a character who we know to value principles over fancy dress, must change her tune. Patricia Field securing a Chanel wardrobe for the cast out of thin air is essentially what Nigel does for Andy in the first film – an important part about her transformation is that she has not actually risen in status, she has just made good friends in high places. In the second film, her new position as features editor at Runway earns Andy enough money to buy a luxury flat in central Manhattan. Maybe scoffing shows the true extent of her desire to retaliate. 

Though a big budget was undoubtedly necessary to secure the returning cast who are now all firmly on the A-list, I can’t help but partially blame the – pardon my French – late-stage capitalist slop on my screen on the rise of streaming services. This story, like all other scripts of the 2020s, has died a sad death; its eulogy will simply be the tudum sound. This is apparent even in the beigeness of the opening scene and Hathaway’s blemish-free face. Netflix has operated under a tiered subscription system for the last decade, wherein you can pay the difference to unlock ‘Ultra HD’ streaming. You can also, of course, pay to stream without ads. The luxury brand scheme that Emily describes is the same financial model that has taken hold of the film industry, causing the decline of cinema attendance and poisoning blockbuster-scale productions. Those who truly want it, the ever-growing roster of streaming services tells us, will pay for it. The rest of us must suffer.

It’s not all bad, though. I am definitely not high and mighty enough to claim myself indifferent to nostalgia bait, especially when it objectively makes a pretty good attempt at regenerating the buzz of its predecessor. Upon rewatching the first film with my friends to refresh our memories, one of them exclaimed: “There’s just so many scenes to queen out to!” This is what the sequel gets right – the focus is still largely on girls and gays, their fun, campy outfits, and of course, a musical number performed by Lady Gaga. Despite its glowering flaws, the film still makes for two hours spent smiling and bopping your head along to the soundtrack. 

However, the funniest part about the whole film is how it postures as self-conscious in a comically “maybe the real Prada was the devils we met along the way” manner, and still manages to be completely dense in other aspects. The 2003 novel The Devil Wears Prada was written by Lauren Weisberger after she spent a period working as Anna Wintour’s personal assistant. Andy is literally given the option to take a $350,000 book deal to write what would have probably been a “gooey” (as Emily accurately characterises her) depiction of the Prada-clad HR disaster that she works for, by Miranda herself, and she still turns it down. “This could hurt Miranda,” she whispers in a trembling voice when she refuses her publisher friend Talia’s (Rachel Bloom) offer for the book, to which Talia rightly responds, “Which is fine, because Miranda is atrocious!” To Andy, it’s more complicated than that, and maybe this is an acceptably humanist approach, but one thing is certain. In the world of The Devil Wears Prada 2, there is one thing that could have never existed: The Devil Wears Prada.

The north-south divide is alive and well at Oxford’s railway station at the end of term. While students heading south crowd the opposite platform, those of us heading north have enough room on the other side of the tracks for a quick kick-about.

The University of Oxford suffers from a severe lack of representation of Northern students, with almost 50% of UK-domiciled undergraduate students coming from London and the South East, while students from the North-West, North-East, and Yorkshire and the Humber made up just 7.6%, 2.5%, and 5% of admissions, respectively, from 2022-2024. There appears to be an inbuilt bias, however unconscious, against the North, the implications of which can be felt in a plethora of ways. 

Accent prejudice in Oxford, for instance, has been well-documented in recent articles from Cherwell and other student newspapers. Bias can start even before the first day – a friend of mine was asked if all the mines were closed yet in the North-East during our offer-holder day. Not exactly a great first impression. These attitudes reflect an ingrained social prejudice that just won’t come unstuck. Nor are they confined to the University. When doing my research for this article, it didn’t take long before I was hit with blatant assumptions about people from the North in the byline of a 2021 Daily Telegraph article, synonymising “bright young things from the North” with “students from poorer backgrounds”.

So you can imagine the pleasant surprise that I felt when the recent careers emails were sent round proudly advertising the “over 50 exciting summer opportunities available across the UK” that were about to drop. A quick browse on Career Connect, though, brought me back down to the (southern) earth, as the claims of placements “across the UK” didn’t come into fruition.

Of the 60-odd opportunities advertised in the first round of domestic summer internships, only one was an in-person placement in the North (an opportunity in Newcastle seems to have slipped through the net – otherwise, the map seems to have been erased north of Watford).

We’re undeniably very lucky at the University of Oxford to have so many internships organised and shared by the careers service. It is heartening to see that many of the placements available are remote, widening opportunities and improving accessibility. It’s also good to see that three regional alumni groups (The Oxford University Society of Cornwall, East Kent, and East Sussex – all, unfortunately, in the south) are offering bursaries to support students from these areas to access internships, while there are also routes within colleges and the broader University to apply for financial support and travel grants. But the implication that I would have to commute to the south in order to conduct a worthwhile in-person internship seems to ignore the many interesting and insightful organisations doing important and varied work in the North. 

While an online placement is certainly better than nothing, the idea that just because I’m from the North, I can’t access the same in-person insights into a workplace as my Southern counterparts seems pretty unfair. Because even if commuting into London, or forking out for a place to stay, was an option (it certainly isn’t for me), at the end of the day, it is the careers office that is missing a trick here. Through failing to advertise placements in many of the hundreds of fantastic organisations that are doing wonderful things in the North, it is the University’s students who are missing out.

Given that Oxford is a southern university, it is both reasonable and to be expected that the domestic internships are therefore weighted towards the South. It would be fantastic, though, if there were even proportional representation, offering a similar percentage of placements in the North as there are northern students. 

In recent years, the University and individual colleges have been making a concerted and commendable effort to improve Northern representation in the student body, with programmes such as Oxford for North East, Oxford for North West, and Oxford for Yorkshire and the Humber offering “workshops, application support, mentoring, and residential visits” in order to boost intake. Through making connections with organisations based in the North, for instance, through linking up with the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, the University could go one step further, cementing relationships with the regions and, in doing so, taking a more holistic approach to boosting northern admissions. Offering internships in the North would demonstrate long-term support for northern students that goes beyond the application process, ensuring equal provision once students are in the door.

For now, though, I had best get back to my search for a placement in those seemingly little-known, off-the-map backwaters like Manchester, Liverpool, and Leeds.